The present invention relates generally to the technical field of building and window structures and in particular to a novel building element and a building structure made from a plurality of building elements.
Within the technical field of building elements, prior art patent applications describing building elements to be included in the building of a house or office building are known. The publications include WO 86/05224, WO 95/23270, WO 99/23344, WO 00/05474, WO 01/25581, WO 02/096623, U.S. Pat. No. 4,994,309, U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,356, U.S. Pat. No. 6,401,428, US 2002/0069600, US 2003/0037493, U.S. Pat. No. 6,591,557 and EP 0 328 823.
Previously, when constructing a building or part of a building such as a front, facade or shop front, methods including building a skeleton or framework of aluminum or steel as the loadcarrying part have been used. E.g. when constructing an office building having a large facade in glass, a metal framework carrying the entire load of the facade was constructed, and on this steel skeleton, fixtures were mounted for fixating and holding window panes. The present invention provides a high strength building element having good thermal insulating properties.
Pultruded fiber glass framing sections have been described previously in patent publications such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,647,172 and EP 0 517 702. The pultruded elements described in these publications are of relatively high complexity and do now allow for multiple elements to be mounted directly together to form structures such as glass facades of buildings.
Building elements comprising pultruded elements have also been described previously in publications such as WO 91/19863 and WO 00/45003.
Glazed window structures comprising pultruded elements have also been described previously in publications such as WO 01/25581, WO 03/62578, U.S. Pat. No. 6,401,428, U.S. Pat. No. 6,613,404, EP 0 328 823, U.S. Pat. No. 4,994,309 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,094,055.
The above-mentioned US publications are hereby incorporated in the present description by reference.
The applicant company is a world-wide leading manufacturer of pultruded structures and has delivered pultruded profiled elements for the building of e.g. bridges and also houses such as the Fiberline Bridge located in Kolding in Denmark and the Eye Catcher building built in Zurich in Switzerland. The advantageous properties of pultruded structural elements as to bearing capability, strength, low weight and further thermal insulating properties is well documented within the industry, e.g. in the manuals delivered by the manufacturers of profiled pultruded elements and in particular by the applicant company including the online design manual available from the applicant company.